The corridor is still white, still warm, and still strangely silent. The subtle hum of filtered air fills the area as engineers, physicists, and welders step into cleanroom shoes, zip into safety suits, and disappear behind the vinyl flaps of Europe’s most complex scientific experiment. They’re making a star—or rather, a machine that aspires to resemble one.
ITER, which means “eater,” is a project that spans a valley in southern France and discreetly captures the interest of more than 2,000 individuals per day from 33 different countries. It’s designed to do one elegant but virtually impossible trick: to fuse hydrogen atoms under extreme heat and pressure, releasing more energy than it consumes.
| Element | Details |
|---|---|
| Key Milestone | U.S. scientists at Lawrence Livermore achieved net energy gain (ignition) in 2025 |
| ITER Project (France) | Expected to begin plasma operations in 2026, aiming for 500MW output |
| Private Sector Progress | Companies like Helion and Commonwealth Fusion targeting pilot plants by 2028–2030 |
| Technology | Uses superheated plasma (150M°C) and magnetic confinement (tokamak design) |
| Challenge | Transition from lab-scale breakthroughs to grid-scale deployment |
| Energy Implications | Potential for near-unlimited, emission-free baseload energy |
| Credible Source | National Geographic – Fusion Progress |
That elusive goal—net energy gain—was realized for the first time just last year by scientists at the U.S. National Ignition Facility. A single experiment created 3.15 megajoules of energy from just 2.05 megajoules input. It was ephemeral and inefficient by industrial standards, but it was historic. For the first time, humans made fusion happen in a way that mattered.
This year, the conversation has altered. It’s no longer about if fusion can succeed, but rather when it can be scaled.
This change has a subtle lyrical quality. For decades, fusion existed in the domain of bumper sticker cynicism: always thirty years away. “Thirty” has evolved into “ten” in government-engineer meetings, and “five” in private companies.
Fusion’s boldness is what makes it so appealing. Hydrogen isotopes, such as deuterium and tritium, which are the fundamental fuel of stars, are heated to 150 million degrees Celsius to create plasma, and then they are forced together. Helium is released as a result of the reaction, and a small amount of stuff is transformed into a huge burst of energy. No carbon. No long-term radioactive waste. Just pure, pristine fire.
And yet, sustaining that fire remains fusion’s most persistent challenge. Inside a tokamak—the doughnut-shaped reactor used in ITER—superheated plasma must be kept away from the walls using complicated magnetic fields. A wobble too acute, or an impurity too great, and the whole reaction fails. It’s a bit like trying to confine lightning with thread.
But in 2026, we’re starting to thread it.
There was more to the ignition event in Livermore last December than just symbolic. It was a culmination of decades of incremental labor, a vote of confidence for ITER, and a spark for private enterprises like Helion, TAE Technologies, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Compact reactors, which promise to be less expensive, cleaner, and quicker to deploy than their government-led siblings, are currently driving each of them.
At a recent energy symposium in Oslo, a venture capitalist compared fusion’s trajectory to the early days of SpaceX. “We’ve moved from waiting for NASA to watching rockets land themselves,” he remarked. “The same thing is starting to happen with energy.”
And that’s when I felt it—the peculiar pause in the room, the sense that what had once felt like faraway sci-fi might finally be rounding the corner into infrastructure.
However, physics is no longer the most difficult aspect. It’s the engineering. Scaling a single pulse of fusion into 24/7 power on the grid needs extreme precision, long-term containment, and materials that can survive intense neutron bombardment. We have the blueprints, but not all the parts.
The ITER reactor is planned to begin plasma operations this year. If successful, it might pave the door for DEMO—a full-scale fusion power station—by the 2030s. Meanwhile, businesses like Helion (funded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman) believe they’ll connect fusion to the grid within the decade.
There are many skeptics, and with good reason. Energy startups are typically optimistic, and some predictions still place practical fusion a generation away. But for the first time, even the cynics are hedging. After the Livermore breakthrough, the tone on Reddit’s r/Futurology slowly transformed. Comments that earlier stated, “30 years away forever,” suddenly remarked, “Maybe 10.”
However, the more significant change can be philosophical. For a long time, fusion’s pitch was salvation: a silver bullet against climatic collapse. However, salvation is a difficult task. Instead, fusion is increasingly being portrayed as infrastructure—something that complements solar and wind, fills gaps when batteries falter, and replaces fossil fuels slowly rather than all at once.
This framing matters. It implies modesty rather than arrogance. It makes fusion feel not just possible but plausible.
There’s still every potential this year ends with delays. ITER may meet logistical obstacles. Funding could dry up. Private reactors could miss technical targets. But 2026 stands out not for certainties, but for the density of advancement. Never before have so many fusion trajectories converged on the same horizon.
And if we get it right—even just once more—we may finally take energy not from carbon or uranium, but from the same process that has quietly driven every sunrise, every leaf, every photon since time started.
It has always been referred to as the future. Now, it’s starting to look like today.
